Roberta De Monticelli

Recent events involving two symbols of ancient and modern philosophy, and two capitals of the Idea of Europe – Athens and Paris – suggest the timeliness of this issue of “Phenomenology and Mind” on Philosophy and the future of Europe. In the spirit of the Manifesto di Ventotene philosophy should be conceived of as the very foundation of the European Utopia, and the Charter of Rights of the European Union as the legally binding incarnation of Ancient and Modern Practical Reason. Dignity and Justice are in fact the alpha and omega of this Charter: two values being respectively the source of what is due to the individual person and what is necessary for the good order of society. The core of the Charter hosts the three central values of Modernity and its battles, liberté, égalité, fraternité (Solidarity), plus a fourth one, not yet explicitly referred to in the preceding Declarations and Constitutions: Citizenship, the value hosting all the virtues of Public Ethics, without which no Republic could survive for long under the rule of law.

This paper defends a version of the Perceptual Model of feeling, according to which feeling is the mode of presence of axiological aspects of reality, or values. After considering the objections to this Model (§1), it presents an intentional analysis of feeling as the core of all emotions, more generally of all the phenomena of affective life, for which it proposes a taxonomy and provides in addition a dedicated phenomenology of feeling consciousness and of the degrees of intuitive cognition of values which may be distinguished in it (§2 and §3). Finally, it reconsiders the objections to the Perceptual Model in order to make sense of them, showing the limits in which they are valid and how to overcome them (§4).

Thatcher’s Perceptual Illusion is presented as a case study to test the fruitfulness of Helmuth Plessner’s Aesthesiology for contemporary philosophical and empirical research on sensory perception (§1). In one reading, Thatcher Illusion’s seems to question Gestalt Theory. We argue that it limits ideed its explanatory power, by forcing us to distinguish physiognomic identity from emotional expression (§2). Although integrating Gestalt Theory, Aesthesiology takes a further step into a thorough criticism of contemporary reductions of Phenomenal Consciousness in terms of Qualia: an embodied-enactive theory of perception (§3). Plessner’s insights into Geometry and Music as “symbolic forms” grounded, respectively, on goal-directed action/objects manipulation, and on emotional expression are expounded (§4). The Thatcher’s Illusion’s Puzzle is solved on the basis of this Plessnerian distinction (§5).

Are values more than measures of our needs and desires or internalized social and cultural rules of behaviour, originating in cultures and devoid of any universally accessible objectivity? Is there a place for values in a world of facts? If so, how can values preserve their ideality and normativity? If not, how can value judgements be true or false? Max Scheler’s Material Axiology is the best answer Classical Phenomenology provides to this dilemma. Yet Material Axiology, in particular material ethics of values, is largely ignored or looked down upon for being based on unclear presuppositions. This paper tries to provide a fresh start by clarifying the bottom-up approach characteristic of phenomenology with an exercise in experimental phenomenology in which I will analyse the actual experience of certain aesthetic values in emotionally qualified perception.

What is the first move in the phenomenological game? As everybody knows, it is an invitation more than a statement or a question: turn to the things themselves. Husserl’s dictum expresses the ambition to carry philosophy outside of its ivory tower and into the world of everyday life, so rich and variegated, teaming with all kinds of natural and artificial objects: all kinds of beings, human and animal, cities and states, institutions, books, works, good and evil, or rather, the numberless variety of goods and ills which surround us. In short, the world of everyday life that we are all concerned with, each from one’s own particular point of view, here and now, at the “zero point” of our personal coordinates: with our spatial horizon (the boundaries of the visible and, beyond that, the geography of the earth and the immensity of the universe which contains it) and our indefinite temporal horizon (the past, the future, each one’s small story encompassed within the grand story of everyone, human history).

We can now better understand the deep significance of the moving avowal Husserl entrusts to a diary note in 1906 (Chap. 3, Sect. 4), where Husserl resumes, as if before God and not in the style of a cv, the essential motivations that had led him across the domains of experimental psychology, arithmetics, and logic. The completion and publication of the Logical Investigations, in the full maturity of his 40 years, Husserl remarks, had finally given a little stability to his interior life that would show “an innermost unity “ from then onwards.” Recall, it was a matter of life or death. “Death” was the achievement of that illusory jump beyond the bonds of truth and falsity, good and evil, that kept being suggested by the “devilish” spirit of a skepticism gone professional, and turned to nihilism. Husserl very well describes the agony of a philosopher struggling against that “death,” which is at once of both soul and mind, threatening the moral and spiritual life and the theoretical life at one blow.

In Husserl’s first book, the Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891)—a series of logical and psychological investigations on the concept of number, which deploy the two principal sources of Husserl’s formation—he describes a particular phenomenon: figural moments. Chapter 11, § 7, entitled “The Figural Moments,” poses the classical problem of the one and the many, perhaps the most ancient problem in Western philosophy. Plato had already confronted this problem in a very intuitive way in his Theaetetus. Let us take two letters, say m and e, that give rise to the word me when arranged together. Does the combination of these two letters, Plato wonders, form a new object—a word—or is the word simply the sum of the two letters? Does the word, so to speak, simply reduce to the plurality of its given elements? For Plato, of course, the correct response is the first, because to form the word me the elements are not sufficient: contiguity and an order of succession are also necessary; thus, a certain form of unity.

Husserl’s unflagging interest in abstract structures and ideal objects is immediately striking. His Prolegomena to a Pure Logics offer an outline of formal ontology that seems to forestall a universal theory of varieties in the Bourbaki style. Moreover, when he engages in the theory of sets and logic with his great contemporaries, Frege, Cantor, and Hilbert, he always does so as their equal. Less obvious, at first glance, is the presence from the outset of Husserl’s equally lively “hunger for fullness,” his conviction that the ultimate source of our knowledge is intuition, that is, a kind of immediate cognition or direct access to contents of every kind. Failure to see how these two demands correlate and support each other throughout Husserl’s entire intellectual career, starting from Philosophy of Arithmetics, has induced most interpreters to describe this career as a progressive descent from the heavens of logic and mathematics down to this earth that we inhabit, embodied in our mortal bodies, embedded in our geographical, historical, social and cultural environments. This description seems quite misleading if it involves more than a shift of focus concerning (some) objects, as if there had been a change in method and fundamental concepts. Even more so if, as it is often the case, eidetic phenomenology gets accordingly relegated to an early stage of Husserl thought, identified as “static” phenomenology, and supposedly dismissed later on, and typically in the later manuscripts and the Crisis, to the advantage of “genetic” phenomenology –as we shall see. A text from the Crisis (§48, footnote) confirms the continuity of Husserl’s primary concern and introduces us to the subject of this chapter:The paradigm of direct cognition is perception in all its sensorial modalities, but typically in the visual mode. The phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty will inherit this theme in particular: perception in all its kinaesthetic implications. From the beginning, just as for the gestalt masters, perception is inseparable from “behavior,” movement, and action, mainly because the perceived object prescribes the standard to perceiving: if I doubt the sight, I touch; if I see only one aspect, I verify the rest “by going around” the thing, and so on.

“Normality,” or compliance with primary normativity (as opposed to severe neurologic and/or psychiatric pathologies), is likely a necessary, surely not sufficient condition for a person to actualize the ideal model of human maturity inscribed in Europe’s educational programs. That is, “moral maturity”: upgrading the life of a “normative animal,” more or less blindly following traditional rules, to the life of a free agent: a moral, civil, political subject, an “autonomous life-center.” Facing this “secondary normativity” is far from representing anthropological normality, even in our democratic societies. On the contrary: if defined in post-Kantian terms – and even, simply, in Socratic terms – moral maturity resembles more the issue of an anthropological revolution, one that is still or again and again in the making.

I said we would practice phenomenological reduction all the time before discussing it (Chap. 3, Sect. 1). Skipping one more presentation of what would become, in the Husserlian corpus, the overgrown protreptic to the exercise of eidetic and axiologic Sachlichkeit, we took up this exercise for the elucidation – based on given examples – of what Husserl means by essence, value, truth, and reason. The idea was to elucidate these concepts while adopting the right, receptive attitude towards the sovereignty of objects, welcoming them as inexhaustible sources of essential and axiological truths. Demythologizing the language of the Faculties of the Mind – Consciousness, Reason, Emotion, Will – by gaining awareness of the inescapable first-personal perspective that we engage in the presence of the never-ending self-unfolding of things, shaken by their affective impact on us, harassed by the demand of reason: that was part of the job. In short, the idea was to revive an awkward and overworn phenomenological language by filling its terms with actualized intuitive meaning.

This book’s title refers to its core idea: there are bonds holding together the manifold phenomena that make up all the concrete things we encounter in the everyday world, and imposing constraints on the variations of these phenomena, by violating which things cease to be what they are. These bonds are given, that is, discovered and not constructed; by virtue of them, things are better or worse examples of their kinds: more or less well-grown fruits, vital animals, useful artifacts, effective institutions, and more or less accomplished human beings. “Given” bonds are a gift in so far as they are sources of lawfulness in natural and social events: they lend customs and familiar patterns to what we call the real world by letting processes of all sorts unfold according to pretty typical and predictable styles. They are also a gift, in so far as they are sources of normativity (of all sorts) for human action, or at least limits to the arbitrariness of human wills, limits that human freedom indeed can and does violate: but they are at least constraints on the meaningfulness of positive norms. Their cognition is what philosophy is about.

This book presents the idea of the gift of bonds as the core intuition of phenomenology, constituting it into that method of philosophical research that Husserl had in mind when he characterized phenomenology as the culmination and fulfillment of Western philosophy. The book clarifies this claim while offering a unitary key to the whole of Husserl's published and posthumous work. The idea of the gift of bonds unfolds progressively as a key to understanding the related notions of essence, material apriori, non-empirical data, structure, ideality, and value. By unveiling the “unitary foundation”, the key concept discussed in the Third Logical Investigation, the present book presents this central notion as capturing the very idea of concreteness, as experienced and phenomenologically described in terms of qualitative “plena”, and the not less important class of ideal or abstract objects. The author takes this concept to be the core theoretical idea of the entire phenomenomenological approach to reality and philosophical research, and argues for this claim in chapters IV-V as it remains a leading thread throughout all chapters of this book. This book appeals to students and researchers working in phenomenology.

The relationship between values, disvalues, and ideals is discussed in this chapter. The author’s main claim is that the low regard for the philosopher’s role and importance in modern societies is the result of the confusion of ideals or axiological reasons with ideologies, particularly those of the last century. However, democracy is not only a form of political government: it is a civilization founded on reason (this claim is argued for through a phenomenological distinction between two modes of social interaction). Disillusionment with practical reason represents the end of democracy. If this end looms over us, it is in no small measure also “our” fault: that is, the fault of public and academic intellectuals, of “educators” who are as prone to be “converted to reality” as they are skeptical about the space of reasons. Where has Socrates gone?

This last chapter takes up the challenges to value cognitivism deployed across the book, drawing in part on Scheler, Husserl, Hartmann, and other classic phenomenologists to set up the main tenets of phenomenological axiology, and confronting contemporary metaethics. Five principles for a phenomenological theory of values and value experience establish the foundations for a cognitive view of practical reason. The relations among value cognition, will, and action are discussed, drawing on Pfänder’s phenomenology of the will. Compatibility between value pluralism and universalism is argued for. An assessment of the significance of “material” axiology for an “examined life” closes the book.

This chapter presents an updated phenomenology of the banality of evil, or the cynical consciousness, inspired by issues and customs rooted in the country of Michelangelo and Galileo, where modernity began but, in its first blossom, failed to achieve the moral and political sovereignty of Everyman. The analysis points to the anonymity to which citizens’ personal lives are reduced when the receptive heart of value cognition is deadened and made obtuse. Indifference rather than hatred and the negative social emotions is under scrutiny here, the idea being that the latter negative emotions are unleashed in their primitive violence only when the sense of one’s personal responsibility fades away, and, with it, the sensitive discernment of the relative weights of goods and ills.

This book opens up a path towards a phenomenological theory of values, or axiology (from the ancient Greek “axios,” worthy). The Introduction provides a survey of its purpose, its method, and its structure. Restoring our confidence in practical reason—by uncovering the sources of evidence for value and normative statements; overcoming the multifarious forms of mainstream value skepticism; rediscovering the essential link between democracy as a form of life and the axiological competence of its subjects—is the ambitious project that this book inaugurates. Its method is the bottom-up analysis of the lifeworld that was practiced by the masters of classical phenomenology. It is articulated into a phenomenology of cynical consciousness, a survey of still influential theories of value rooted in twentieth-century philosophy, and an outline of phenomenological axiology.

This chapter tracks several forms of value agnosticism, skepticism, relativism, or even nihilism, starting from Marxist historicism and Heideggerian criticism of modernity, by contrasting them to a family of progressive, universalistic, and ethically committed “free spirits,” among which is a founding father of the European Union. The puzzling choice of a sort of “epistemic abstinence” by most liberal philosophers after Rawls’s Political Liberalism is contrasted with value cognitivism and pointed out as a significant cause of intellectual disenchantment concerning democracy. A critical discussion of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, a paradigm of nihilistic sophistry as opposed to Husserl’s Socratic philosophy, closes the chapter.

The first half of the twentieth century has seen the bankruptcy of practical reason: two world wars and totalitarian states. However, the second half of it set out great normative documents and institutions (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the new constitutions of the refounded European states, the European Union and its charter of rights), making for a “normative embodiment of practical reason,” i.e. the most amazing, albeit partial and imperfect, actualization of the ethical legacy of ancient and modern philosophy. In this chapter, the American legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin (1931–2013) acts as a guide to the proper axiological meaning of the great normative documents and their misconception by some of the most famous axiological skeptics of the past century.

Post-Quinean Nominalism is widely regarded as a metaphysics of concreteness, suggesting (in line with scientific naturalism) that ordinary language and common sense might be in the grip of “ordinary hallucinations” (Varzi 2010), or untutored belief in abstract entities. Drawing on both medieval and contemporary sources, this paper argues that, far from encouraging our minds to stick to concreteness and individuals, an untutored usage of Ockham’s Razor prompts the elision of concreteness and the everyday world from contemporary metaphysics. A theory of individuality based on Husserl’s concept of Unitary Foundation is outlined, and partially traced back to the metaphysicians of essential individuality, or haecceity: Boethius, Scotus, Leibniz – the champions of the “Unitarian Tradition.”

Modern tradition takes a person to be a rational (and moral) agent, namely an agent capable of acting on the basis of reasons – often desire-independent reasons, and particularly moral reasons. So, agency and freedom are involved in the definition of personhood. But what about the embodiment of persons? What about their rootedness in the particular circumstances of a human life – time, space, community of origin, material, and axiological culture? What about the individual identity of persons, their irreducible individuality? The phenomenological notion of intentionality has a widely neglected richness of content, making it a key conceptual tool, capable of explaining not only consciousness but also rational agency, that is personhood, right from the level of the most basic and embodied instances of consciousness: perception, emotion, and spontaneous action. These should be considered as acts, rather than as states, and the discussion of the specific intentionality of these acts and their motivational relations purports to be an original contribution to a genetic phenomenology of embodied, individualized personhood and rational agency.

Il pensiero pratico dominante nel Novecento europeo fornisce risposte negative alla questione se sia possibile una fondazione razionale del pensiero pratico, configurando una posizione di scetticismo assiologico e morale ancora oggi maggioritaria. Ma il secolo xx, se da un lato ha rappresentato la bancarotta della ragione pratica, dall'altro ne ha prodotto una vera e propria incarnazione, nelle istituzioni e organizzazioni internazionali, nelle costituzioni rigide degli Stati europei del dopoguerra, nella Dichiarazione Universale dei diritti dell'essere umano del 1948 ecc. Come puň la filosofia pratica portarsi all'altezza della ragione pratica incarnata, invece di minacciarla dall'interno con le sue neo-sofistiche, attraverso relativismi, soggettivismi, nichilismi, politeismi assiologici e simili?